The federal Pell Grant program is the cornerstone of college aid for low-income undergraduates, providing roughly $39 billion in fiscal year 2025 to help students pay for college. Those dollars go almost exclusively to semester-long academic programs leading to college degrees.
President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act added a new twist to the Pell program. It created Workforce Pell, a bipartisan policy change that makes students in short-term, job-focused training programs eligible for Pell Grants. This sounds like a modest tweak to the nation’s main college-aid program. But it isn’t.
It’s a big bet that faster, job-focused credentials can become real pathways to opportunity. It also acknowledges that the traditional semester-by-semester college model is no longer the only route to economic mobility.
“What [Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s revolt is against them.”
[…]
“The fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”
In the late 1940s, following wartime-driven innovation, the mass production of inexpensive plastics revolutionized American life. For the first time, plastic toothbrushes, bottles, kitchenware, and furniture were widely available to the public. Yet soon after, a new question arose: what do we do with all this waste?
Today, that decades-long challenge remains unresolved. The OECD estimates that the U.S. generates more than 73 million metric tons of plastic waste annually, about 485 pounds per person. And while nearly everyone agrees that plastic waste in landfills and oceans is a problem, consensus on how to solve it remains elusive.
On one side, free-market advocates insist the issue can be fixed through voluntary corporate measures, not regulation. Yet, despite companies redesigning products and promoting reuse, these efforts have barely made a dent in total waste. On the other side, some environmental groups advocate blanket bans or drastic production limits, while downplaying the need for better collection, recycling, and infrastructure. They also often ignore that paper, glass, or metal alternatives can demand more energy, water, or emissions to produce and transport.
It is time for a pragmatic middle path that embraces innovation to make sustainability work. That’s where advanced recycling comes in.
WASHINGTON — A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), finds that the Federal Reserve’s cap on debit card interchange fees failed to deliver savings for consumers and instead reduced access to free checking, led to higher maintenance and overdraft fees, and pushed billions of dollars in spending toward higher fee credit cards.
The report, “The Unanticipated Costs and Consequences of Federal Reserve Regulation of Debit Card Interchange Fees,” authored by Robert Shapiro, PPI co-founder and Chairman of Sonecon, and Jerome Davis, Senior Data Analyst at Sonecon, provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the effects of the 2011 regulation created under the Dodd Frank Act. Drawing on more than a decade of data and scores of previous studies, the authors demonstrate that the policy did not lower retail prices and ultimately left many working Americans worse off.
“Congress expected that capping debit interchange fees would decrease costs for families who rely on debit cards for everyday purchases,” said Shapiro. “The opposite happened. Banks recovered lost revenue by raising account fees, and consumers shifted toward credit cards with higher interchange costs. Despite the intentions of the provision’s sponsors, consumers lost, most merchants lost, and the changes in bank fees produced new financial pressures for lower and moderate-income and many middle-class households.”
Key findings from the report:
The debit fee cap failed to deliver consumer savings. Merchants did not lower prices, and early surveys show fewer than 2% passed through any savings while most made no change or raised prices.
Giant national retail chains captured most of any savings by merchants. Large retailers accounted for 73% of all purchases- becoming the main beneficiary of interchange fees.
Banks offset lost revenues from the capped interchange fees by raising consumer account costs. Covered banks sharply reduced free checking, increased maintenance and overdraft fees, and raised minimum balance requirements, with lower income households bearing the greatest burden.
Growth in higher fee credit card use erased most merchant savings. Banks shifted incentives to credit cards with unregulated interchange fees, and by 2022 these shifts offset 67% of merchants’ debit fee savings.
The report also assesses current legislative proposals, including the Credit Card Competition Act which would require new routing rules on credit card transactions. The authors conclude that the legislation risks repeating the same mistakes Congress made almost 15 years ago by imposing price controls without reducing the underlying costs of the payment system.
“Regulating payments without reducing the true drivers of cost does not make the system cheaper. It moves the bill to someone else,” said Shapiro. “In this case, the very people these policies were intended to help end up paying more.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.
Racial diversity does not necessarily follow economic diversity
On many campuses, officials hoped the focus on economic diversity would preserve racial diversity — Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans have the country’s highest poverty rates. But even as low-income numbers climb, many elite campuses have seen racial diversity decrease.
Without the emphasis on income, those decreases might have been even steeper, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocates for class-based affirmative action. He called the latest Pell figures “a significant step in the right direction.”
“Economic diversity is important in its own right,” he said. “It’s important that America’s leadership class — which disproportionately derives from selective colleges — include people who’ve faced economic hardships in life.”
[…]
Earlier this year the College Board — the nonprofit that oversees the SAT — suddenly discontinued an offering that gave admissions offices a wealth of information about applicants, including earnings data from their neighborhoods.
Kahlenberg and others see it as a retreat in the face of government pressure. The College Board offered little explanation, citing changes to federal and state policy around the use of demographic information in admissions.
Americans currently use debit cards and credit cards for nearly 82% of their payments and purchases, almost double the share as recently as 2003. In 2022, they used debit cards 98 billion times for payments totaling $4.34 trillion and credit cards 55.3 billion times for payments totaling $5.42 trillion.
The U.S. economy now runs on electronic payments, and every purchase and sale depends on an intricate network that involves not only consumers and merchants, but also the merchants’ banks, the banks that issue the debit and credit cards and maintain their cardholders’ accounts, and network processors such as Visa and MasterCard that intermediate the electronic exchanges.
Merchants bear much of the costs of this payment system through “interchange fees” they pay to the card-issuing banks and network processors. The network processors, working with the card- issuing banks, set the fees for credit card sales using formulas that depend on the value of the sale and the credit lines and rewards provided by the issuing bank. Under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2009, the Federal Reserve caps interchange fees for purchases by debit cards issued by large banks (assets of $10 billion and more) based on a baseline fee of 21 cents, 0.05% of a sale’s value, and a 1-cent charge to cover banks’ fraud prevention operations.
The regulation creates large disparities in a sale’s interchange fees based on whether the consumer makes the purchase with a debit card or a credit card. For a $40 retail purchase with a Visa or MasterCard debit card, merchants pay and card issuing banks receive a fee of 23 cents, versus fees of 67 cents to 94 cents for the same $40 sale using a Visa or MasterCard credit card.
The debit card fee cap is intended to lower retail prices based on merchants passing along their interchange fee cost savings to consumers. It has not happened: A thorough review finds that several developments have precluded merchants from passing along such savings to consumers. Firstly, the savings are much less than expected. The Federal Reserve formula produced no savings for small debit card sales of $5 or $10; instead, the baseline fee produces interchange costs for such purchases that exceed the average profit margins for retail operations. The regulation also led cardissuing banks to recoup some foregone revenues from debit card transactions by enhancing the appeal and use of their credit cards, and increased credit card use with higher, unregulated interchange fees from this dynamic and other changes have offset much of the merchants’ savings from the capped fees for debit card sales.
The net savings from regulating the interchange fee costs only for purchases by debit card and the increased credit card use cannot support any meaningful price cuts for all purchases, and charging less only for debit-card sales would alienate credit card and cash customers. While merchants are legally permitted to offer discounts, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reports that merchants in 2023 provided discounts for only 2.6% of payments by debit card, 3.6% of cash payments, and 4.5% of credit card payments.
According to a survey of merchants one year after the regulation took effect, 1.2% passed along any savings, 21.6% raised their prices, and 77.2% made no price adjustments. Drawing on another decade of evidence, a series of economic studies have found that the cap’s impact on consumer prices “appears negligible,” finding “little evidence” of any consumer savings or that any benefits were “unmeasurable.”
Analysts also find that the cap led to unanticipated increases in bank fees and charges. The case for the regulation focused on the dynamic between a merchant’s costs for a debit card sale and consumer prices, but electronic payments occur in a “two-sided market” that also involves exchanges between merchants and the banks that issue debit and credit cards and manage their cardholders’ accounts. The card-issuing banks subject to the cap responded to their foregone debit card interchange revenues by increasing other consumer charges for monthly accounts, overdrafts, and ATM use, and by limiting access to no-fee accounts.
Banks also enhanced the consumer appeal for their credit cards with higher, unregulated interchange fees by increasing the rewards and cashback payments they provide for using their credit cards. Based on changes in how consumers pay for their retail purchases, it apparently worked. By total numbers, the share of retail sales by credit card nearly doubled from 2012 to 2024, while the share of cash payments fell by more than half, and the share by debit card increased little. Measured by the total value of retail payments, the share by credit card also jumped sharply, while the share by cash payments fell substantially, and the share by debit card declined. As the number and value of cash retail sales fell sharply in this period, new credit card inducements likely attracted many former cash-paying consumers.
The use of credit cards with rewards and cashback payments does clearly differ by household income: Less than half of Americans with incomes under $25,000 have credit cards, compared to 89% of those with incomes of $50,000 to $100,000 and 97% with incomes over $100,000. Data also show that 90% of Asian Americans and 86% of White Americans have credit cards, versus 70% of Black Americans and 74% of Hispanic Americans.
Even so, access to reward cards is based mainly on credit scores, not incomes. A 2018 study from the Federal Reserve Board found only a modest correlation between income and credit scores, a finding supported by a later study issued by the American Bankers Association. The authors of the Federal Reserve analysis further established that credit scores at every income level range from excellent to poor, confirming that “income is not a strong predictor of credit scores, or vice versa.
The two-sided market dynamics in banking charges, however, have disproportionately burdened lower-income and minority Americans. Higher banking fees based on a threshold monthly balance affected 70% of accountholders in the lowest income quintile versus 3% in the highest quintile, and the number of households citing high bank account fees as a reason for not maintaining a bank account jumped 81%. As a result, the unanticipated effects of the debit card regulation on banking fees and access to bank accounts created a barrier for some lower-income households to establish sound credit scores needed for bank loans, as well as access to credit cards with rewards and cashback payments.
Drawing on a decade of evidence, we can also gauge the impact of the debit card cap and the two-sided market dynamics on merchants’ total interchange fee costs. First, we measured the growth trends in debit card and credit card use in the years leading up to the cap and applied those trends to their use from 2012 to 2022 under the cap. In this alternate scenario, based on relative growth rates prior to the cap, debit card purchases in 2022 would have been $1.4 trillion greater, and credit card purchases would have been $1.4 trillion less.
To estimate the accompanying effects on merchants’ total interchange costs, we determined the current average credit card interchange rate and the current average rate for debit card sales issued by banks exempt from the cap as a proxy for the unregulated debit card interchange rate. Next, we applied those rates to the alternate scenario. This analysis found that under the alternative scenario, the cap and market responses reduced merchants’ debit card interchange costs in 2022 by $37.4 billion while their fee costs for credit card sales increased by $25.2 billion. This tells us that the increased use of credit cards, with their higher interchange fees, offset 67.4% of merchants’ cost savings from the cap on debit card interchange fees. In addition, the major beneficiaries of the net savings have not been local merchants and their customers but large national retail chains and their shareholders. Sales by retailers with revenues of $100 million and more account for 72.5% of all consumer purchases, including 54% of retail sales by chains with more than $2.5 billion in annual revenues,19 and the 10 largest U.S. retailers alone account for nearly 30% of all retail sales.
Despite these lessons from the regulation of debit card interchange fees, Congress is considering another proposal to help consumers by lowering merchants’ credit card interchange costs. The proposal would require that merchants choose between using the Visa or MasterCard processing network or their smaller competitors, before transacting each credit card sale. Given the extensive experience and analysis of unintended adverse effects from capping debit card interchange fees, this change is also unlikely to benefit American consumers.
On November 18, Live Nation-Ticketmaster filed a motion for summary judgment in the federal and state antitrust lawsuit against the company. The case was brought in 2024 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration and 40 state attorneys general. Plaintiffs in the landmark Sherman Act case allege that Live Nation-Ticketmaster uses its monopoly power in primary ticketing services for major venues, concert promotion, and venue management to stifle competition, harming consumers, rival concert promoters, and artists.
If successful, the DOJ’s case would bring tangible relief to millions of U.S. music fans, many of whom take a keen interest in the case that even extends to grassroots mobilization efforts to support it. The most likely remedy is breaking off Ticketmaster, the dominant ticketing platform in the U.S., from Live Nation, which is equally dominant in concert promotion and venue management. This would eliminate the company’s supercharged incentives to use its monopoly power across markets in the live events supply chain to foreclose competition in primary ticketing.
By wielding its power, the live events behemoth continues to hobble competition, including smaller primary ticketers and resale ticketing services. The reality is that consumers have virtually no choice in primary ticketing providers. As a result, they pay monopoly ticket fees and are captive to Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s outdated and glitchy technology. Consumers desperately need relief from its anticompetitive conduct to lower ticket fees, get better quality service, and improve access to live entertainment.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s motion seeks to convince Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York that the evidence produced in the case doesn’t support the government’s claim. If so, the judge can decide it now, as a matter of law, without a trial. But Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s “nothing to see here” routine doesn’t hold much water, for reasons that range from the 10,000-foot view to the nitty-gritty of law and economics.
FACT: Worldwide HIV/AIDS mortality down 80% since PEPFAR launch.
THE NUMBERS: Eswatini life expectancy at birth –
2023
64
2022
63
2020
60
2015
55
2010
48
2005
44
1989
62
WHAT THEY MEAN:
On this year’s World AIDS Day: The principal U.S. support program — the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” or PEPFAR, for short — is a success story with an uncertain future. As a point of entry, here’s one of the countries the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit hardest:
Eswatini is a small inland kingdom of 1.3 million people bordering South Africa and Mozambique. Its HIV-positive rate, 23.4% of adults, is the world’s highest. In the early 2000s, Swazi health officers were counting 11,000 AIDS deaths a year — one in every hundred people – and reported a drop in life expectancy at birth from 62 years to 42. A grim point of comparison suggests how extreme that is: Chinese life expectancy at birth appears to have fallen by 1.5 years during World War II, and by six months during the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution decade from 1959 to 1969.
Pulling back: In the early 2000s, about 40 million people were HIV-positive — 2 million in the United States and other “developed” countries, 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 7 million in South and Southeast Asia, 2.1 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 4 million elsewhere around the world. Over 3 million died annually. UNAIDS’ 2005 report is a reminder:
“Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed 3.1 million [2.8–3.6 million] lives in 2005; more than half a million (570 000) were children. The total number of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reached its highest level: an estimated 40.3 million [36.7–45.3 million] people are now living with HIV. Close to 5 million people were newly infected with the virus in 2005.”
Governments and charities attempting to respond in lower-income countries were trying to manage multiple large challenges, each of which made all the others harder to solve:
Low patient awareness. Most HIV-positive adults in developing countries were untested and unaware of their status.
Medicine scarcity: Antiretroviral triple-drug therapy was launched only in the late 1990s, and availability worldwide was very limited.
Difficulty delivering care when patients were aware and medicines available: Millions of potential patients lived in rural areas and large city slums with few clinics and fewer trained nurses and doctors.
Finance: Most developing-country health ministries are small and lack the money to meet any one of these practical challenges, let alone all of them at once.
PEPFAR, which the second Bush administration launched in 2003, and the following administrations continued through 2024, has been the U.S.’s big response. Its various national accounts — prevention and education, testing, medicine, orphan and dependent care — and contributions to the Global Fund and UNAIDS combined for just under $7 billion per year during the Biden administration. This was about a third of the world’s $22 billion in total HIV/AIDS support. Taken as a whole, it aimed to support education, make testing widely available, provide large volumes of medicine, and train staff in delivery and care. Run by seven agencies headed by the Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, but mainly administered by professional staff and contractors at USAID and the Centers for Disease Control, PEPFAR programs were operating in 120 countries this past January, providing anti-retroviral medicines to 20.1 million people, care and shelter for 7 million orphans, and “PrEP” preventative treatment for 1.5 million people.
Since the launch, treatment has spread to reach nearly 32 million of the 41 million people now believed HIV-positive worldwide. Annual new infection estimates have dropped from 3.4 million to about 1.3 million a year. And mortality is down from the 3 million annual deaths of the early 2000s to about 630,000 per year now. In sum, over its two decades, PEPFAR has earned a plausible claim to the mantle of the postwar Marshall Plan: an ambitious concept on a global scale, efficient practical implementation, and commitment to the common good.
This year, the Trump administration shut down the main PEPFAR administrator, the U.S. Agency for International Development. According to the U.S. government’s aid tallies, American support for global health aid fell from $13.2 billion in FY 2024 to $4.7 billion in 2025. The administration did, though, promise to preserve PEPFAR by shifting program management to the State Department. This has, in fact, happened, though with lots of transitional damage — fired contractors, lost human talent, interrupted care — over the spring and summer, with consequences such as loss of PrEP access for 2.5 million people worldwide, closed clinics in Zimbabwe, and doubling counts of secondary mpox infections in Kenya. Taking into account the much larger drop in U.S. support for health and humanitarian relief, the Gates Foundation predicts a rise in childhood deaths of about 200,000 in 2025. Looking to 2026, the administration’s September strangely titled “America First Global Health Strategy” proposes to continue PEPFAR programs but cut U.S. government spending on them by about $1.7 billion, while asking beneficiary countries to contribute more to close the resulting gaps.
Returning to Eswatini, where U.S. health support has dropped from $75 million in 2024 to $19 million this year: The pandemic is far from over. But measured both by health policy criteria and by real-world results, as of 2024, Eswatini was meeting its main challenges. A 2023 national survey showed 94% of adults with HIV were aware of their status; 97% of them were using antiretroviral medicines, and virus suppression was achieved in 96% of antiretroviral patients. More generally, (a) HIV-positivity rates have dropped from the 29.4% peak in the mid-2010s to this year’s 23.4%; (b) 213,000 Swazi were taking antiretrovirals, as against 500 in 2005; (c) 20,000 are testing each month; (d) AIDS mortality has dropped by 75%, from the 11,000 deaths per year of the early 2000s to 2,600 last year; and (e) national life expectancy in 2023 for the first time exceeded pre-HIV pandemic rates and continues to rise. And two weeks ago, residual PEPFAR money helped add a new treatment — lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection medicine — to Eswatini’s health program.
On this World AIDS Day, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has accomplished an astonishing amount of good in its first two decades. PEPFAR authors and the U.S. aid staff who ran the programs should take great pride in their contribution to this 80% drop in mortality. It isn’t finished, and 630,000 deaths is still a very large number. Congress shouldn’t let it stop before it’s done.
The U.S. government’s PEPFAR data site has numbers. As of today, they’re frozen and given an unsettling asterisk: “data.pepfar.gov is currently undergoing updates and will return soon with refreshed data and interactive dashboards.”
Foreignassistance.gov reports health, humanitarian relief, democracy, food aid, and other U.S. aid spending by country.
A mixed assessment from the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
A more critical look — “Tough Times, Tough Choices” — from the Center for Global Development.
And the Gates Foundation fears a rise of 200,000 in childhood deaths.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
70% of parents say that protections should constantly keep minors safe while using apps — not just check their age once at download.
A majority of parents believe that a one-time age check at the point of download will not make kids more safe online.
Only one in three (34%) believe app store age verification alone will keep kids safe online
Over half (54%) of adults say they do not trust apps to keep kids’ age information secure from hackers or other bad actors.
A majority of adults, including 70% of parents, worry that requiring parental approval for every app download creates a “slippery slope” that could restrict access to important information.
Parents are looking for solutions that empower them to make decisions about how to protect their children online. Congress is considering several proposals, varied in their obligations and strategies to keep children safe. But few have aligned closely with the balanced, comprehensive approach that parents prefer, according to a PPI survey. H.R. 6333, the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA), new bipartisan legislation introduced by Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.), provides a welcome, more balanced approach.
Parents Want Continuous Protection
Parents want protection that is more than just a one-time check. A PPI survey via Morning Consult, conducted earlier this fall, found that 70% of parents believe protections should be constantly keeping minors safe while using an app. While some proposed legislation, like the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), places the responsibility for age verification entirely on app stores with a one-time age check, just one in three parents thinks that this app store age verification strategy alone would keep kids safe online.
POPA balances responsibility for verification between app stores and app developers, in line with what parents want. It requires app stores to provide developers with an age signal, and then requires app developers to also require the right safety measures within apps. These developer obligations ensure continuous protection by requiring developers to appropriately restrict high-risk features.
Prioritizing Privacy and Data Protection
Parents also care deeply about privacy. More than half of adults say they don’t trust apps with keeping kids’ info safe from hackers or other bad actors. It’s essential that data collected for age verification purposes isn’t used for other purposes, like targeted advertising. POPA includes protections on the use of age verification data and keeps information collection to a minimum. It also makes sure only apps that need the age signal are receiving the age signal.
Avoiding Parental Consent Fatigue
Age verification methods should also be sustainable and thoughtful in order to avoid consent fatigue. When parents are asked for consent too many times, they can become overwhelmed, accepting terms habitually without considering the details of the request. As experiences with Europe’s privacy regulations have shown, poorly designed consent requests can undermine well-intentioned policy. While some age verification policies like the ASAA risk consent fatigue with high friction consent requests for every download, POPA takes a balanced approach that will keep parents engaged and kids protected by allowing parents to block categories of apps by age rating and enabling app developers to make sure they aren’t visible to minors at all. With 70% of parents worried that requiring parental app approval for every app download could restrict access to important info, selecting a policy that addresses these concerns is critical.
Parental sentiment is clear: we must take action to keep kids safe online. The Parents Over Platforms Act adopts a thoughtful, dual approach to verification, protects privacy, and avoids the pitfall of consent fatigue, while addressing the parental concerns reported in the PPI survey.
This article originally appeared on Peter Juul’s personal Substack, The Dive.
We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just-released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.
But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of ideologues who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.
In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy — a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.
Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite-explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.
Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow — presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.
Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.
Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries — as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.
Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump — or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers — would like the United States to do in Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s killing spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.
China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing — a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.
It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.
On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus — his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.
Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail — though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles upon which it is based and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.
In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?
Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility — a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history. As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”
America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.
There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.
America’s defense industry can no longer produce arms and ammunition at the required cost, scale, and speed. Despite some progress in reviving munitions production since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the American defense industry no longer resembles the famed arsenal of democracy that won World War II or the sprawling military-industrial complex that helped keep the peace during the Cold War.
To be sure, America’s defense industry makes some of the world’s finest and most advanced military hardware. But it’s expensive to develop and build that hardware, and since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has too often spent enormous sums on gear that takes too long to field and cannot be bought in sufficient quantities — leaving the U.S. military with aging combat aircraft, warships, and other equipment that costs more and more to maintain over time. Some programs like the B-21 stealth bomber have come in below projected costs, but general problems with production speed, scale, and cost remain pervasive across the industry.
And in major armed conflicts like the war in Ukraine, strategy scholar Phillips Payson O’Brien reminds us, “The military equipment with which a country starts a war is normally eaten up in short order, and the war becomes a desperate test to make, repair and recreate military force.”
There’s no silver bullet to fix these issues — they’ve been decades in the making and will require concerted efforts to rectify. But these three core ideas can help guide efforts to make America’s defense industry the arsenal of democracy once again:
Send strong, consistent demand signals
Work with partners and allies — don’t alienate and antagonize them
DONALD TRUMP HAS ASSUMED from the start of the war in Ukraine that Russia will win. “You have no cards,” the president told Volodymyr Zelensky when he ambushed the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February, and he repeated the point recently on Air Force One. Asked why the latest U.S. peace proposal would give Russia a huge chunk of land it has been unable to win on the battlefield, Trump told a reporter, “Look, the way [the war is] going . . . it’s just moving in one direction. So eventually that’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway.”
Vladimir Putin rushed to underscore the point, boasting when Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week that Russian forces had captured the frontline city of Pokrovsk. Many Western observers parrot Putin’s claims about the contested rail hub in eastern Ukraine, arguing that the battle there is a major turning point, giving a Russia a “gateway” to the west and, before long, conquest of all Ukraine. In fact, it’s not clear that Russia has yet taken Pokrovsk—Kyiv maintains it’s still holding on. But even if the town falls in the coming weeks, it hardly means Ukraine is losing the war.
If recent news reports are accurate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likely issued an illegal order to give no quarter in the first of what are now many likely illegal strikes against alleged narcotics trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. Already manifestly unfit and unqualified for the job, focused primarily on fighting culture wars and politicizing, and having previously endangered American military personnel by discussing sensitive operational details over an off-the-books group chat, Hegseth may now be guilty of war crimes if not outright murder.
Congress must now embark on a thorough investigation of these strikes and Hegseth’s potentially criminal role in ordering them. Ultimate responsibility for these immoral and likely illegal military actions rests with President Donald Trump, but Hegseth bears significant responsibility of his own for following and executing Trump’s directives. As secretary of defense, however, Hegseth has the right and duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders from the president — but he has chosen to follow them instead.
Indeed, Trump likely nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense in part because, like Trump, he possesses few if any qualms about ordering the American military to act in direct contravention of the laws of war. As a Fox News television personality during the first Trump term, for instance, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes by his fellow SEALs, and defended others charged with or alleged to have ordered similar crimes. His partisan polemics, moreover, seep with barely-concealed contempt for the laws and rules of war. In Hegseth’s telling, America fails to win wars because the U.S. military cannot act like its enemies and commit obvious war crimes with abandon — a morally reprehensible stance that drags America down and damages our standing in the world.
Hegseth also summoned the military’s highest-ranking officers back to the United States in September for a lecture that included, among other things, a promise that the military would no longer have to follow “stupid rules of engagement.” He also reportedly forced Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, to resign less than a year into his three-year appointment after Holsey expressed doubts about the legality of the Trump administration’s boat strikes — doubts buttressed by the command’s senior military lawyer, whose view that such strikes were illegal was overruled by the Trump administration’s lawyers.
In a blatant attempt to intimidate critics, moreover, Hegseth has absurdly threatened Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — a retired Navy pilot and astronaut who flew 39 combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War and piloted four space shuttle missions from 2001 to 2011 — with a court-martial for recording a video with other Congressional Democrats that reminded American servicemembers of their right to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth has acted beneath the dignity of his office in other ways, such as active trolling on social media and provoking a Canadian children’s book publisher to condemn him for using one of their characters in a juvenile AI-generated meme.
Hegseth has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no business holding his present office. In a normal political universe, he would never have been nominated as secretary of defense in the first place. But we live in abnormal times, and President Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense because of their shared disdain for the laws of war and the notion of basic human dignity during armed conflict. Given its general subservience to Trump, this Congress will almost certainly not impeach and remove Hegseth — no matter how much he deserves to be dismissed from office.
Assuming he remains Secretary of Defense and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term election, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office should be one of a new Democratic majority’s first orders of business. If successful, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office will be only the start of accountability for the Trump administration’s lawless and immoral war in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific — but a start must be made.
In a memo to Warner Bros. staff, Zaslav said the sale “reflects the realities of an industry undergoing generational change — in how stories are financed, produced, distributed, and discovered.”
“The proposed combination of Warner Bros. and Netflix reflects complementary strengths, more choice and value for consumers, a stronger entertainment industry, increased opportunity for creative talent, and long-term value creation for shareholders,” he wrote. Elements of Warner Bros. Discovery outside the deal, including the cable news channels CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery, will be part of a new stand-alone company called Discovery Global, Zaslav said, which he expected to be squared away by the third quarter of 2026.
The deal would require shareholder approval and regulatory approval from President Donald Trump’s administration. In its regulatory filing disclosing the terms of the deal, Netflix offered a $5.8 billion breakup fee should the deal fall apart as a result of antitrust or other legal challenges. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about whether it would challenge the deal.
“Given what is happening in entertainment markets, the DOJ is very likely to take a close look,” said Diana Moss, director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left-leaning think tank. “There could be concerns over eliminating head-to-head competition and potential competition.”
Moss noted allegations by liberal lawmakers that the Trump administration interfered in similar mergers, including the Paramount-Skydance deal, to advance the president’s personal agenda. Paramount has said it “has no knowledge of any promises or commitments made to President Trump.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Within days of the deal announcement, Trump made clear he would handle it differently from his predecessors. Past presidents have seldom involved themselves in antitrust reviews involving mergers between companies. That’s in part because past Presidents normally separated themselves from decisions made by the Justice Department. Trump has made clear in his second term that the Justice Department answers to him.
Trump’s approach threatens to set “a terrible precedent,” says Diana Moss, former president of the American Antitrust Institute and current vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute. “White House interference in antitrust cases, whether it’s mergers or monopolization cases or other cases, really threatens at the very core due process and the rule of law,” Moss tells TIME.
Less than a decade ago, young U.S. progressives started agitating for a Green New Deal to combat climate change and usher in a planned economy more planet-friendly than capitalism.
It was a bold, if implausible, demand for a crash program to rid America of fossil fuels. Animating it were decades of increasingly dire prophesies about how global warming is irreversibly impairing life on Earth.
In the U.S., environmental groups pressured politicians to keep fossil fuels “in the ground” even as advances in fracking technology were unlocking a bonanza of shale oil and gas.
In 2020, first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stoked a social media frenzy by joining Green New Deal activists in a ‘60s-style sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.
President Joe Biden got with the program, portentously calling climate change “an existential crisis” rising above such humdrum public concerns as spiking inflation and uncontrolled immigration.
Today, however, the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality. Therein lies a cautionary tale for Democrats about the gulf that separates elite and popular opinion on climate change.
Put simply, green activists have failed to convert America’s non-college majority to their cause. Working class voters recognize the problem but it takes a back seat to their everyday economic and social concerns.
